"And one of my favorite accidents in the movie is what happens when the curtains are closed and it's something that we saw happen that they close the curtains and bumped up against them and it made this remarkable pattern that--I remember at the time that we all just laughed hysterically, we thought it was the funniest thing we'd ever seen."

"I think you didn't say cut for awhile because we just kept watching the blinds pulsating."

"We let the scene go on and on and on." (laughing)

"Walter Parkes, Larry Lasker, and I wrote this screenplay over the course of about 8 years. I think it was from about 1981 to '89 or so, and um, this was one of the scenes that we spent a lot of time getting right and it was one of the most fun scenes to write because it's all about the repetition of the sound--"I leave message here on service"--that the audience isn't supposed to be concentrating on. The idea is to give them visual things to be looking at, and other concepts ...."

(continued)

"That little shot there I remember being a horror show because this van interior was...existed as a set but in that shot you see three of the walls."

"Right"

"And it's sort of working in a submarine, trying to figure out how to get the camera in there with the actors because it's only a few feet wide, the available walking space."

"How did you?"

"I don't remember now how we did that thing, I just remember it took forever. I don't know if we flew a wall or if we just had a little sled dolly."

"And if you look on the office building roof across the street you'll see the van. It was very expensive to get that up there. We want you all to see it." (laughs)

"And I think it's up on blocks because that wall actually blocked most of it, so it had to be raised."

"Right"

"I remember people coming to you and showing you chip design options for quite a while and I don't remember the rejects very well."

"Rejects didn't look very special and finally Ken Pepiot designed this one which was sort of silver-plated and really beautiful and really stood out."

Note: Ken Pepiot is credited as special effects coordinator.

"And now Bob pours on the charm."

"I don't think any audience in any movie theatre ever heard Bob's line, 'Give him ... help.'" (laughs)

"The laughter kind of covered up the next ten seconds."

"We struggled to get the van in this shot, as I recall. We had to get very low."

"Yeah, which we tried to avoid generally."

"Right"

"And this was great fun. We were shooting a party sequence and realized we didn't have any party. We had a lot of people talking. So very late one night, I think I said to you, 'Pick a spot where I can just put them and we'll jump-cut them dancing with each other', and you sort of lit a little area and we told everybody without any advance warning you're going to dance and they all danced differently."

(Continued...)

"This is one of those scenes where the set and the size of the cast made it take a longer than everybody thought. You know I was thinking on paper it's just a few pages, or....

- RIght.

And then when you actually start dealing with this many people in a scene and that big a space it's...

- It takes forever to light it.

Forever, yeah.

And coverage, you know, every time somebody's talking you've got to get all these reaction shots of the others."

"As I recall it was scheduled for about 4 days and it took nine.

- Yeah

And the way that we reported to the studio was after you finished a sequence you reported whether you were on schedule or off and we didn't have to report until the end of that nine days that we had just gone five days over so the executives went to bed that night thinking we were on schedule and when they woke up the next morning we were five days over schedule. That got their attention."

"Another part of the set that I really loved was those glass bricks. You were able to put that blue light behind it.

- Yeah. They were pretty spot."

"We're coming up to a shot now, the shot in which the computer graphics are reflected off of David's dark sunglasses, was an incredibly difficult shot to get. And as I recall we tried it once, we hired a company that said, 'Oh yeah, we know how to do this.' And they--what did they do? They took down the back wall of the set and ....

- It was done as a projection and they took the material we wanted reflected and they projected it and we kept saying 'It looks awfully dark.' (continued)

"And they said, 'No, this is gonna work great.' And then we went to the dailies and the reflection was too dark, you couldn't read it at all. So then we came back and we just put it on two really big monitors and reflected one monitor in each side of his eyeglasses and that, the low-technology version was better than the high-tech version.

- I seem to recall we spent about a half day on the high-tech version, with no results."

"He's a really accommodating actor I think and really interested in every part of how the movie is made and ....

- Right

- And was always enthusiastic about any technical request that we had done.

- Right

- What Phil?

- Before we started shooting he actually spent some time at a school for the blind and tried to pick up as much as he could about what it's like to be blind and then when we were shooting in this set in the Lair in-between takes you would see..." (continued)

"While we were shooting the film, Universal was bought by the Matsushita Corporation of Japan and we did get some inquiries as to why we were showing GoldStar monitors which is a Korean company. I seem to recall ducking that question. (laughs)

We were instructed, however, not to show any Sony monitors because Sony had just bought Columbia Studios."

"Now we had this thing that we did on this film a lot that we call "the power pan". You want to describe that?

- It's a way to get energy into a shot instantly by using a long lens on somebody when they're walking quickly across a big open space like the loft and the Lair really lent itself to that, to power panning, because there was so much room for people to walk through. And it just immediately sort of amped things up a little bit to use like at least a 100mm lens on ... (continued)

"...somebody as they crashed through the set."

"This shot where Sidney walks in front of Mary if I recall in order for him to get there he had to off-camera be vaulting over equipment and cables and on one of the takes David Strathairn and River Phoenix and Dan Akroyd burst into laughter just as he was about to do his first line and Sidney looked over to them and they said, 'We're so sorry but we couldn't believe that you actually made it.' It was a real athletic feat." (laughs)